My work has the full support of the family.

When a local university archive began back in the 1930s, a family member died and letters were donated to the library. A librarian told me that they wouldn’t be accepted nowadays. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t assert rights. I want to post my transcriptions of the letters of the family during the Civil War. Will I have a possible problem?

I don’t mind posting my thanks to both the family and the library, but don’t want a legal battle with the university’s lawyers.

Archives will often receive original materials, but unless they receive those materials from the author or the present copyright holder, the archive could not have received the copyright. Even if the materials were provided by the author, the copyright would not transfer unless there was an agreement to do so. (The agreement does not need to be in writing if it is non-exclusive, so this may become a factual question.)

The New York courts that have addressed the copyright infringement issues involving republication of personal letters have not applied contract law use any agreement with the archive as the basis for determining the appropriateness of the publication. (A court could, of course, enforce the contract. But the measure of damages would be very different than the injunction sought by the copyright claimant.)

The other consideration is the date of the work’s creation, date of publication if any, and date of the author’s death. All three dates must be assessed to determine whether a work remains protected by copyright. Beyond these rights, however, family members can only assert power to the extent they retain physical materials or to the extent the researcher agrees to limit the work out of deference or contractual agreement.

I hope this helps.

Jon

Exactly.

I will keep an eye on your blog and see how your project progresses.

Eric

If I understand the two of you correctly, the copyright status and ownership is passed along with the work as it is tranferred from the physical manuscript medium to the digitized images of the manuscript, to the transcription. This makes sense — upon reflection, an author who hires a typists isn’t transferring the copyright over the typed copy of their book to that typist.

So in my case, the transcription of the out-of-copyright manuscript remains public domain, while the markup, annotations and indexes added by my users is their property, subject to whatever licenses they’ve agreed to.

Thanks for your encouraging words, Eric. I’m documenting my project at my blog if you’re interested in tracking its progress or offering suggestions from your own experience.

Dave’s got it just right.

Copyright can attach to anything new done to the original work. So, if you annotate the original work, as I have done on several occasions, the annotations are subject to copyright protection. The original material, however, is in the public domain and is not subject to copyright protection in any form.

I hope your software works out. It will make my work infinitely easier. I have an entire set of letters to transcribe.

Eric

Ben,

the copyright generally extends to any new material in the work – introductions, indexing, literary criticism, etc. It does not extend to the original material. Hence, you could reprint all of Dickens’ words in the above example, without fear of legal trouble. But if there is a new intro, you cannot scan that…

Dave Powell

Wandering through Borders tonight, I poked around a bit and found that most of their out-of-copyright books have 2007 copyright notices by the publisher. Funny, I had no idea Charles Dickens signed a deal with Borders Classics!

I’m working on software to automate manuscript transcription, so this is extremely relevant to my project. The last thing that I (or soldierstudies.org, for that matter) need is to reward users for their work transcribing documents by having their transcriptions scraped and re-posted by the sort of ad-festooned plagiarists that have been poaching Wikipedia .

Thanks for a thought-provoking discussion.

No problem at all about plugging your site. Feel free to put up some more information about it if you like.

And thanks for spurring this discussion in the first place.

Eric